Elliot Wolfson. Nocturnal Seeing: Hopelessness of Hope and Philosophical Gnosis in Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024. 392 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is an erudite and, more importantly, an insightful book-act.Nocturnal Seeing features a Wolfson seemingly different from the accomplished scholar of Kabbalah and from the Merleau-Pontian reader of phenomenology with Kabbalah (e.g., A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, 2011).Wolfson has already published The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes (2023), on the unsuspected depths of this reader-interlocutor of Heidegger. 1 Devoting his initial chapter to her frank exploration of Hei-1 See Elliot Wolfson, The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes: Between Nihilism and Hope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023).Although Susan Taubes was best known, to English-speaking readers, for her novel Divorcing, published in 1969, the year of her drowning in East Hampton-and despite a dissertation devoted to Simone Weil and directed by Paul Tillich, the exceptional dialogue she inaugurated was with Heidegger, whom she read with utter clarity of insight, as a contemporary gnostic.See, notably, Wolfson's chapter three, "Gnosis and the Covert Theology of Antitheology: Heidegger, Apocalypticism, and Gnosticism," 128-185.132
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.015 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".